Monday, March 31, 2025
Friday, March 21, 2025
the last book I read
We're in Woolworth's. I mean, back when Woolworth's was a thing, and therefore being in one was a thing you might possibly do. That actually only rules out dates later than about 2008, but we're much earlier here; in fact we're in 1944, during the Second World War. And here are our five main characters: Jo, Val, Ben, Alec and Vern, all small children aged about five. But why have we chosen this moment to meet them? Well, something significant is about to happen, but we'll circle back to it at the end, if you don't mind.
So now we commence a series of flash-forwards, first by five years to 1949, and then in a series of fifteen-year jumps to 1964, 1979, 1994 and finally 2009, when each of the main cast of characters is around seventy. All five start out in the (fictional) London borough of Bexford but then take different paths through life.
Alec goes from wise-cracking schoolkid to cocky twentysomething looking for a break in the newspaper business, which he gets as a typesetter. His natural bolshiness and interest in left-wing politics also make him ideal as a union representative. The fact that his job is in jeopardy by the late 1970s isn't any reflection on his skill at it, but just a reflection of the changing times and the development of computers that will eventually make his entire job obsolete. Alec fights against the inevitable, and leads his colleagues in a lengthy strike, but eventually finds himself out of a job and takes a swerve into the teaching profession.
Vern, a big, ungainly kid, matures into a big, formidable adult making a slightly dodgy living in the property rental business and nursing a slightly incongruous love for opera on the quiet when no-one else is listening. Eventually the business climate takes a downturn and he is back to square one (not to mention being booted out on the street by his wife), but gradually puts his business back together so successfully that he's able to afford lavish trips to indulge his love of opera; the full black tie and quail's eggs extravaganza. But a change of fortune is always just round the corner, and if you spend your life pissing everyone off in pursuit of your aims, including your own family, you may find that they are disinclined to help out when you really need them.
Jo and Val, the twins, take different paths through life: Val falls in with a group of ne'er-do-wells led by the charismatic Mike, whose slightly cool and exciting rocker rebelliousness has by the late 1970s curdled into skinhead ultra-nationalism. But at least if he slakes his thirst for a bit of the old ultraviolence out on the streets then he won't feel the need to come home and take it out on the missus, right? Eventually the inevitable happens and Mike administers a beating to a young Asian bloke that tips over into murder and he gets put away for a long stretch. After Mike eventually dies in prison Val gets a job as a volunteer for the Samaritans, dispensing some of her hard-earned life experience. Meanwhile Jo has spent an entertaining couple of decades in California as musical sidekick and occasional lover to Ricky, a fellow Londoner who has become a proper massive rock star. Eventually that comes to an end, as all things do, and she returns to England and a job as a teacher in a secondary school.
Finally there's Ben, already by his twenties in the grip of some fairly serious mental illness and on a pretty heavy prescribed drug regime. a few years later and he appears to be off the prescription drugs but self-medicating fairly heavily with brain-numbing quantities of weed while just about holding down a job as a bus conductor. After another fifteen years his life appears to have taken a miraculous turn for the better after a chance meeting with Martha, the Nigerian proprietor of a café where he's got a part-time job - she straightens him out by marching him off to the GP for a proper prescription of anti-depressants, and once he's sorted out in the old noggin department promotes him to full-time employee and eventually husband.
So by the last instalment in 2009 everyone's had their fair share of triumph and disaster, marriage and divorce, birth and death, tears and laughter, light and shade, etc. Has anyone changed the world, become Prime Minister, found a cure for athlete's foot or anything like that? Well, no, but who is to judge the value of an individual life? And who knows what small barely-noticeable ripple that one of us might make during our time here might eventually accumulate into something momentous after we've gone?
Well, I hope you're comfy on that rug, because prepare to have it pulled from under you: the event described in the first chapter is the V2 rocket impact on Woolworth's in New Cross in November 1944 in which 168 people died, including many children. In the fictionalised version of it that features our five protagonists, they are all, with various parents, directly under the point of impact and it is made very clear that they are all pretty much vaporised into their component molecules by the ensuing blast. So what follows is a possible alternative future if some part of the preceding few minutes had played out differently and the rocket's trajectory had altered by a fraction of a degree and it had pancaked harmlessly into the Thames, or possibly slaughtered a different 168 people in a different building.
So how do we feel about this? We'll have to be self-aware enough to realise that any responses like "well, that's rubbish then, none of it was real" are a bit problematic; after all, none of it was real anyway, it's a novel, literally made up by someone. I think my problems with it, to the extent that I have any, are as follows: firstly, if you skip the first chapter what you have left is an interesting but not wholly remarkable set of occasionally intertwining stories about five kids from London and their various adventures in life. That's fine, but pasting the framing device on the front almost looks like an attempt to imbue the stories that follow with a sort of poignancy and significance that they haven't really earned. Secondly (and this is really just the first criticism again in a slightly different form), the first chapter is so brilliantly written, with its Nicholson Baker-esque slowing of time to a nanosecond crawl to describe the rocket's arrival through the roof of the building and the impossibly violent chemical reaction happening inside it, that it raises expectations that the rest of the book can't possibly live up to. The other example that springs to mind of an opening chapter so perfect that the rest of the book was a bit of a let-down in comparison is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.
To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it just felt to me like the structure didn't quite knit together properly, or, to put it another way, the carrot of something bold and structurally experimental was dangled and then never quite followed through on. It is worth pointing out that quite a lot of people disagreed with me, though.
A couple of footnotes: some of the fragility-and-preciousness-of-life stuff, particularly towards the end, is fairly explicitly Goddy, but not in a way that I found annoying, or perhaps my mild annoyance at the book's structure distracted me. The other thing that struck me was how similar Ben's intrusive thoughts were - particularly during his weed-addled on-the-buses episode - to the borderline personality disorder stuff described by Joe Tracini in his various videos and books.
Monday, March 17, 2025
incidental music spot of the day
Hey, we haven't done one of these for a while (three-and-a-half years or so in fact), but I was struck by the loose yet funky tune that plays over the latest Haven Holidays advert, as it was highly recognisable to me as Can You Get To That by Funkadelic. My recollection is that I discovered Funkadelic off the back of some sort of Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time article in a music magazine that pointed me to Maggot Brain, which certainly fits the bill as it is essentially a ten-minute guitar solo courtesy of guitarist Eddie Hazel.
That in turn led me to the album of the same name, and thence a few of the other albums from their early/mid-1970s heyday, including my favourite one Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On which not only was a fixture in the CD player in the RV we hired for our honeymoon in Canada in 2011, but also provided, in Sexy Ways, the first dance song at our wedding in June 2011, a choice I absolutely stand by 14 years later, even as I largely disown the improvised dance moves I came up with to accompany it.
As an aside, if the Stone Roses hadn't heard the title track of Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On before they wrote the lengthy funky stop-start outro to I Am The Resurrection then I'll eat my hat.
Sunday, March 09, 2025
the last book I read
A man is dead, on a beach. Suspicious? I should bally well say so. Suicide? Yes, but how? Well, surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun? Well, no, actually it looks as if he died by cyanide poisoning, as did the young lady found beside him. A classic lovers' suicide, then, by the look of it; an open and shut case. Well, just a minute there, you're forgetting rumpled detective Jutaro Torigai: kare wa kisoku ni shitagawanai ippikiōkami no keikandaga, kekka wa dashite iru.
The suicidal couple are quickly identified as Kenichi Sayama, an assistant section chief at a government ministry, and Hideko Kuwayama, known to everyone as Toki, a waitress at a Tokyo restaurant. So what were they doing at a beach near Fukuoka, many miles south-west of Tokyo and indeed on a whole different island?
Questioning the locals in the vicinity of the beach doesn't reveal much, apart from a couple of sightings of a couple walking in the vicinity of the local railway stations, though the timings of the sightings don't really add up properly. More information is forthcoming back in Tokyo, where it transpires that Sayama and Toki were spotted boarding the express to Fukuoka by a couple of Toki's fellow waitresses from the restaurant, in the company of one of their regular customers, prominent businessman Mr. Yasuda. Meanwhile it is revealed that the ministry that Sayama worked for was embroiled in a corruption scandal - maybe Sayama knew some inconvenient things? Could he have been rubbed out? But how could someone have engineered not only his suicide (or apparent suicide) but that of his clandestine lover as well?
Torigai and his Tokyo counterpart Kiichi Mihara start with the obvious stuff: what were the lovers doing for the few days between being sighted at the railway station in Tokyo and being found on the beach, and what do the waitresses and Mr. Yasuda know? Mihara, a diligent and slightly obsessive guy, soon comes across an oddity: Yasuda and the waitresses could only have had a clear view across the railway lines to the platform from which the express departed during a specific four-minute interval a few minutes before the departure of Yasuda's train. Is this too much of a coincidence? Could Yasuda have engineered things in some way? Was he concerned about revelations of corruption affecting some of his lucrative business dealings with the ministry?
All of this speculation is a bit pointless, though, since the actual murders (if they were murders) happened several days later and several hundred miles away, and it turns out Yasuda has a cast-iron alibi for that period, as he was in Hokkaido for a business trip, a trip also involving a lengthy rail journey from Tokyo. Or was he? Isn't just happening to be right at the far end of the country a bit too convenient? Mihara begins picking away at every aspect of Yasuda's seemingly painstakingly-constructed alibi and sees it start to unravel: no-one actually saw him on the train until a few stops from its final destination, Sapporo, the telegram he supposedly sent earlier from the train was sent by someone else, and his bed-ridden wife Ryoko just happens to be an authority on the minutiae of rail timetabling. Coincidence? OR IS IT?
Anyway, Mihara's persistence eventually cracks the case (SPOILER ALERT from here on, naturally): Yasuda really was at the beach on the night in question and then travelled to Hokkaido by plane in time to hop on the train a couple of stops from Sapporo and make it look as if he'd been on it the whole way. Not only was Ryoko - genuinely incapacitated by chronic tuberculosis, but not, as it turns out, completely bed-ridden - instrumental in concocting the railway scheduling ruse that enabled Yasuda to establish the pretence of Toki and Sayama being lovers (they knew each other, but that was it), but she also was at the beach on the night of the murders and helped her husband do the deed - in the process revenging herself on Toki whom she knew to have been actually her husband's lover, not Sayama's. Her husband's primary motive, as the detectives had already surmised, was eliminating a potential whistle-blower in the corruption investigation who might have jeopardised some lucrative business arrangements, and as a handy by-product offing an erstwhile lover whom he'd got a bit bored with.
Like most murder mysteries the solution here doesn't really stand up to being thought about too much, but the unpicking of the mystery is very satisfying. The shift in viewpoint about a third of the way through from Torigai, who you'd assumed would drive the investigation, to Mihara is a bit jarring - Torigai only popping up thereafter to exchange a couple of letters with Mihara and be the recipient of Mihara's summing-up at the end wherein it is revealed that the Yasudas conveniently offed themselves in their own lovers' suicide pact when they felt the investigative net closing in on them. The minute dissection of rail timetables may not be for everyone, but the whole thing is only 149 pages in my nice new Penguin Classics edition. The original English translations had the title Points And Lines, which I think is probably better.
Previous novels on this list to have been translated from the original Japanese are The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and the two Murakamis, Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance.
Postscript: I meant to add that this is another book on this list to feature a map, two in this case, the first just a general map of Japan presumably included to illustrate how Tokyo is pretty much in the middle of the country and Fukuoka and Sapporo at opposite ends, and the second to make a bit of sense of the murder location and the maze of train lines that cross and intersect near there.
Friday, March 07, 2025
celebrity lookeylikey of the day
Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.
The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.
Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently.
did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023
Tuesday, March 04, 2025
is she sleeping? I don't think so
Clearly I need to be careful about even alluding tangentially to the very existence of The Curse Of Electric Halibut, since my doing so in the last book review has almost immediately resulted (with a bit of time-travel involved, admittedly) in my learning of the death of Jennifer Johnston, novelist, playwright and specifically for the purposes of this list author of The Illusionist, which I read back in July 2012 and mentioned in passing much more recently in my post about The Prestige.
You will notice that I didn't mention her in any of the various posts where I break my supposed rule regarding not speculating luridly about future deaths; I think my mental picture of the author of The Illusionist would have been of someone quite a bit younger than the 65 that she was at the time. Anyway, she was 95 when she died, which makes her the oldest curse victim, beating by around ten months a record held since relatively recently by Milan Kundera.
Monday, March 03, 2025
the last book I read
So this is Frank Bascombe. You guys have met before, actually - you might remember, a few years back. Frank is working as a realtor, or an estate agent as you Brits would have it, and has made a pretty nice living out of it. So much so, in fact, that he now runs his own company, Realty-Wise. He's moved out of the town of Haddam where he lived in the previous two books in which he features, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and now lives not far away in the quiet New Jersey coastal resort of Sea-Clift.
Frank is in his mid-fifties now (it's late 2000 when the book opens, in the controversial aftermath of the Bush-Gore presidential election) and, while he keeps himself in pretty trim shape, has had to make certain accommodations to middle age, not least in coming to terms with a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer, a (depressingly) quintessentially middle- and even old-aged man's disease. Any worries about how this, and its accompanying radiotherapy treatment regime, might affect regular combat operations in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, are rendered sadly academic, at least for the moment, by Frank's second wife Sally recently upping and leaving him in a somewhat bizarre sequence of events.
Basically while Frank and his first wife Ann just got divorced in a fairly mundane way, Sally's first husband Wally disappeared, apparently in a fairly permanent way, shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam in about 1970. Well, OK, a bit weird, but these things happen, and Sally has put it behind her. Except it turns out it isn't behind her after all, as one day Wally just turns up out of the blue at his parents' place and announces he's been scraping a living in some sort of commune on the Isle of Mull for the last couple of decades. Frank isn't sure how to react to this news, nor how he expects Sally to react (still less what the legal ramifications are for his marriage to her). What he probably isn't expecting is for her to head off back to Mull with Wally - not necessarily permanently, so she says, but to try and resolve some unfinished business.
So Frank finds himself on his own in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Well, not quite on his own, as plans gradually come together to reunite what remains of his family for the day. His daughter Clarissa has been spending some time with him anyway as she's decided to take charge of the situation regarding his cancer treatment. Clarissa is herself navigating some life changes though - previously in a fairly stable relationship with her girlfriend Cookie, she has recently split up with her and is now back on solids with new boyfriend Thom. Frank's son Paul, meanwhile, of a slightly more challenging personality type but seemingly making a decent living as a slogan writer for Hallmark cards, is also due to arrive with his new girlfriend Jill. Finally, in a rash moment, Frank invites his ex-wife Ann (who, to be fair, is also Clarissa and Paul's mother) who seems to be going through a bit of a personal crisis following the death of her second husband.
Frank has a few things to sort out before he and the family can settle in to some serious troughing down into the old brined and deep-fried turkey and a couple of hundredweight of candied yams, creamed corn and similar incomprehensible American Thanksgiving cuisine. Firstly he has to go and facilitate the sale of a chalet with his Realty-Wise protégé, Mike, something he manages to fuck up after insisting the prospective client view the inside of the property, thereby inadvertently facilitating a mildly terrifying encounter with a feral fox. Then he has an encounter with Detective Marinara, who has transcended being named after a pasta sauce to rise through the police ranks and has been put in charge of investigating an explosion at Haddam hospital resulting in the death of a member of staff, as it happens someone known personally to Frank. No suggestion that Frank is a suspect, but Marinara wants to tie up a few loose ends. Finally, and most bizarrely of all, and putting a pretty comprehensive spanner in the Thanksgiving works, the Feensters, Frank's generally irritating and awful neighbours, are held up by a couple of heavily-armed feral youths who want to steal their cars (a couple of flashy and ostentatious Corvettes), and in the front-yard confrontation which follows both Feensters are comprehensively ventilated and Frank is shot in the chest - non-fatally as it turns out.
A wibbly-wobbly dissolve now to a few months later - Frank is out of hospital having recovered from his gunshot woulds, and is on his way to another hospital to have his prostate investigated to see how the radiotherapy has gone. Accompanying him on the plane trip is Sally, returned from Mull and tentatively reunited with Frank.
As I said above, this is the third novel in what a lot of people at the time referred to as the "Bascombe trilogy", presumably in the expectation that Richard Ford was getting on a bit, there was quite a gap between books and that that might be all of them. I think Ford himself may also have dropped some hints that that was likely to be it. Not a bit of it, in fact, as there have subsequently been two further books: the punderfully-titled Let Me Be Frank With You, a collection of loosely-linked short stories, in 2014, and then the novel Be Mine in 2023, which, as if to prove that people never learn, Ford's Wikipedia page confidently refers to as the "presumably final" novel in the series. I mean, maybe it is - if nothing else Ford is now 81, and this list exists, so, well, you do the math.
Never mind all that, though: is it any good? Well, yes, I would say it is, although it must also be said that standard sequelitis applies as much here as it does to lower forms of art such as, say, the Police Academy movies. The alert reader who's read the first two books will certainly observe fairly early on that the general structure here is very similar to that of Independence Day, just substituting in Thanksgiving as the significant event that the novel's events meander their way towards. And meander they certainly do, as the entire timeline of the novel's 700+ pages (more on this in a bit) occupies only about three days, and moreover the assumed climax of the book, the Thanksgiving dinner at which certain uncomfortable family discussions may occur, grievances will be aired, revelations, erm, revelated, etc. etc., never actually occurs, Frank's near-murder putting a stop to it (again, something quite similar occurs in Independence Day). So while the writing style is very smooth and digestible and Frank is an appealing middle-class everyman - bright, basically decent, occasionally mercurial and still haunted by the premature death of his son Ralph back in the early 1980s and the subsequent collapse of his first marriage - there are moments where the reader wishes the characters and their author would just GET ON WITH IT a bit.
That general low-key meandery-ness and the general polo-and-chino-clad white middle-class-ness of it all makes the lurid purple-lycra-clad vulgarity of the Feensters even more jarring, and their subsequent messy demise doubly so, although I guess messy multiple murder in a quiet suburban setting - clearly a thing that does happen, especially in the USA - is inherently jarring and weird.
The thing that resonated specifically with me was that The Lay Of The Land just happens to capture a snapshot of Frank Bascombe when he is exactly the same age that I am now. It's sobering, since if I were to be somehow rendered not constantly, painfully, conscious of how unbelievably old I am and obliged to work just from the description of Frank offered here and my own physical sensations I'd say: well, this old geezer is clearly quite a bit older than me: prostate cancer, occasional dizzy spells, bladder trouble (admittedly mostly a side-effect of the cancer treatment), while I, tragic male pattern baldness aside, am a fit and active guy, weigh no more than I did twenty years ago, still irrepressibly and priapically horny, etc. That sounds like a brag, and I suppose it partly is, but the main point is that this stuff happens to everyone sooner or later, and, also, I suppose, that one's own residual self-image isn't the best guide to objective external reality as observed by others.
The timelines, incidentally, assuming that my assertions about Frank's son Paul's age in the Independence Day post are accurate, go something like this:
- The Sportswriter
- Published: 1986
- Set: 1983
- My reading: ??late 1990s/early 2000s??
- Independence Day
- Published: 1995
- Set: 1988
- My reading: 2009
- The Lay Of The Land
- Published: 2006
- Set: 2000
- My reading: 2025
Finally, my paperback copy of The Lay Of The Land is not only an intimidating 726 pages, but is also printed on incredibly thin paper, so that it's a lot thinner than you'd expect. To illustrate this, here it is with my copy of Independence Day, which is 451 pages but about the same thickness, and my ancient copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which at 734 pages is almost exactly the same length but nearly twice as thick.
I assume the legend printed on the publisher information page and reproduced below is relevant here, though what it actually means is unclear to me. Conversely and contrariwise the print is quite large and widely-spaced at only 28 lines per page (Independence Day has 39), so if it were printed differently it'd be a lot shorter. This Guardian review, presumably of a differently-formatted hardback edition, lists it as 487 pages.
Lastly, and more importantly, my copy is missing some pages around the middle of the book, in particular pages 361-362, 375-378 and 391-392 (i.e. four physical sheets of paper in total). The nature of the book being what it is we can be reasonably confident that no alien invasions, bukkake dungeon sex orgies or hideously-botched scientific experiments involving cloning Hitler happen on those pages, but it's a bit annoying nonetheless. The only other time I recall this happening was when I read Bluesman, though that was only one sheet (i.e. two pages). I see from searching for that link that something similar (a printing error rather than a binding error in this case) happened with my copy of Lolita as well.
Friday, January 31, 2025
the last book I read
Hong Kong? Phooey! No, really, it's true. Former British colony, business powerhouse, cultural melting pot, land of opportunity, hive of scum and villainy. And the people! Well. Let's meet some of them.
Dawn Stone is a journalist, taking a pretty standard Glenda Slagg route through UK tabloid journalism, showbiz scandal, obsessive royal-watching and all, until an ex-colleague makes her an interesting offer: come and work for him on a new magazine he's starting up in Hong Kong. Bit of tabloidesque fluff required, naturally, but also a potential opportunity for some Proper Investigative Journalism, and, hey, maybe there's a book in it. Dawn is a bit bored of her current job, and of her current boyfriend, so she jumps at the chance.
It's all pretty fabulous at first - exciting new culture, lots of sipping gin while being whizzed around the harbour in luxury yachts, although there is a bit of shadiness about where some of the money is coming from, and how the slightly murky Wo family are pulling various strings and controlling various interests with a thin veneer of respectability but probably also involving a visit from some guys with meat cleavers if you get in their way.
After getting the go-ahead from her boss to do some digging into the local business set-up, with its murky links to the Triads, drugs and illegal gambling activities, Dawn works up an article she's pretty proud of, only for it to be made clear to her that it's going to be spiked, as the business pies that the Wos have fingers in include the magazine she's written the article for. The man delivering the message on behalf of the Wo family, Philip Oss, is very nice about it, though, and has a couple of alternative ideas for Dawn to consider: firstly a very lucrative executive position as a sort of PR person for the Wo business empire, and secondly a very lucrative SEXecutive SEX position as his mistress.
A change of viewpoint now: Tom Stewart, a simple country boy from Kent but with a restless urge to travel, sets out on a long boat journey to Hong Kong in 1935 without much clear idea of what he's going to do when he gets there. He meets a motley band of fellow travellers on the ship including Sister Maria, a Chinese nun who teaches him to speak Cantonese and who will feature intermittently but significantly in his life thereafter.
Tom is a bright, ambitious and hard-working chap and soon gets a good job at a prominent local hotel. A few years of making a nice peaceful living come to an end when World War II breaks out and the colony comes under threat of Japanese invasion. Tom's Cantonese skills make him highly valuable to the resistance effort and he slightly reluctantly becomes involved with some shady activities, until his group is inevitably betrayed and he is imprisoned by the Japanese invaders.
Eventually the war ends, Hong Kong is liberated and Tom briefly returns to England to see his family, but soon chafes at domestic rural life and decides to return to Hong Kong permanently. He reunites with Sister Maria after some intermittent contact during the war - Maria has been helping with some translation work which has indirectly helped in the prosecution of a minor member of the Wo family, and - although it can never be proved - it is assumed, certainly by Tom, that the Wos are in some way responsible for her subsequent disappearance.
Tom remains in Hong Kong and lives into relatively contented old age, making a nice comfortable living off the hotel. No romantic entanglements to speak of, and, well, yes, you'll be saying, that's because he was somewhat inappropriately IN LOVE with A NUN, i.e. Sister Maria, the whole time. A pity he couldn't, you know, do anything about it, but that's life. Hardest game in the world, the old nunning game. Well hold onto your wimples, because while Tom is having a grumpy-old-man-style altercation with some surly youths at a taxi rank a young man approaches him, sees off the youths with a spot of the old kung fu, and introduces himself as Tom's grandson.
The young man, whose viewpoint we now switch to, goes by the (somewhat Anglicised) name of Matthew Ho and when we meet him in the mid-1990s he's a successful businessman running a company making air-conditioning units. Never mind all that hot air (well, cold air) though, what's the story with Tom having a child? Well, you've probably guessed, but it turns out that there was a particularly fraught period early in the Japanese occupation when Tom and Maria were holed up in an abandoned school in the New Territories hiding from the Japanese troops, and Tom decided that the best course of action would be for him to give himself up, Maria herself being just another local as far as they'd be concerned unless endangered by being seen to be harbouring Westerners. Maria attempted to persuade him otherwise by suggesting they get, hem hem, "holed up" in a slightly different way and evidently Tom jumped at the opportunity and then went ahead and gave himself up the next day anyway.
Matthew delivers some letters from Maria that he'd been entrusted (including the whole explaining that she'd had his child thing) with to Tom and the two establish an affectionate relationship. Over the years his air-conditioning business becomes successful but the impending handover of Hong Kong to China introduces some uncertainty, to the extent that he decides he needs a Chinese backer to avoid the company going under. An opportunity is provided by an introduction to Dawn Stone, now a high-powered executive who's ascended the greasy pole of career advancement partly by her own talents and partly by also regularly ascending Philip Oss's greasy pole. Anyway, Dawn provides an introduction to the people she works for, who are of course the Wo family. Mr. Wo seems receptive and offers some terms that Matthew finds acceptable. Matthew is naturally delighted, but now has to travel to Hong Kong and broach the subject with his grandfather, notoriously not a big fan of the Wo family after their probable involvement with abducting and murdering the woman he loved. Tricky times.
The novel ends before Matthew and Tom meet to discuss the thorny issue of Matthew entering into a business relationship with Maria's probable murderers (or at least people who represent the same organisation), but it seems unlikely Tom will just shrug it off with a heeyyyy, whaddaya gonna do? But who knows? Maybe he's mellowed in his old age. The reader may also find themselves struggling a bit to care much about the fate of an air-conditioning company, at least in comparison to the compelling details of Tom and Maria's wartime adventures. Tom's story is the heart of the book, and the sections featuring Dawn and Matthew which bookend it are much shorter and, to be blunt, less interesting. The sections describing Tom's wartime captivity and the arbitrary indignities he is subjected to are, for obvious reasons, the most compelling bit of the book, and quite reminiscent of Empire Of The Sun. The other book on this list to have Hong Kong as its principal location is Kowloon Tong.
As always, write about what you know is sound advice, and it turns out John Lanchester grew up (up to the age of about ten) in Hong Kong, and has an evident love for the place. I myself briefly visited Hong Kong in late 1976 and have some hazy memories of it, including a trip on a junk across Hong Kong harbour, which is definitely real as I have photos, and the spectacular approach to Kai Tak airport which is definitely a real thing and where we definitely did fly into and out of, but I couldn't say whether the recollection I have of looking out of the window of the plane during the approach through the Kowloon apartment blocks is real or not.
Anyway, this is all very good, the slight reservations about structure aside. It's also the latest book in this series to carry a map at the front, reproduced below.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
the last book I read
Hey, how are you? Come on in, there's some people I want you to meet. So this is Sasha - she's, eh, I dunno, thirtysomething? She works for a record company, primarily for this guy over here, Bennie Salazar. We'll get to him in a minute. Anyway, Sasha has a nice little flat in New York, a job she likes, as long as she can gracefully swerve Bennie occasionally making a pass at her. Strictly entre nous she's got a few, if you will, issues of her own, though; main one is she's kind of a kleptomaniac. Wallets, purses, little trinkets, you name it. She's in therapy, though - I mean, like all of us, right? - trying to work it all through. Anyway, back to Bennie - big record company exec and talent finder; trouble with that is you're only as good as your recent talent finds, though, right? And Bennie is a bit worried he might have lost his golden touch after a couple of finds turn out to be screechily unlistenable. Or maybe he's just getting old?
So here's Bennie's music industry mentor from when he was much younger, Lou. They got to know each other when Lou was screwing one of Bennie's friends, Jocelyn. Later we'll meet a couple of Lou's kids, Charlie and Rolph, on a safari trip with Lou's girlfriend, Mindy. Mindy in turn is eyeing up the tour guide, Albert.
OK, so ... this is Scotty, another of Bennie's friends from when he was younger. Scotty's a musician but he's gone off the rails a bit lately and he's kind of a hobo these days, hoicking mutant fish out of the East River to eat.
So you can tell we're moving backward and forward in time, here, right? I mean the episodes involving young Bennie and Lou are obviously in the past, and you sort of assume by default that the early parts involving Sasha and Bennie are in the loose "present", but, well, just keep your wits about you. Anyway, here's Bennie's second wife, Stephanie, living with him in suburbia and trying to fit in with the tennis club set. And here's Stephanie's brother Jules, a writer, but fresh out of prison after some bizarre incident involving a young actress. And here's Stephanie's boss at her PR firm, Dolly aka La Doll, who turns up shortly after running some sort of publicity scheme for a Middle Eastern dictator to humanise his image a bit (after some unfortunate publicity about murder and torture and genocide and tiresome stuff like that). The actress Dolly chooses to employ to fake a celebrity romance with this guy turns out to be none other than Kitty Jackson, the actress Jules assaulted.
Back in time a bit now to meet Drew and Rob, boyfriend and unrequited admirer respectively of Sasha. They hang out a bit, then decide, for ill-defined reasons (but following a night of drink and drug ingestion), to go for a swim in the East River, whereupon Rob gets into difficulties and drowns.
Then we meet Ted, Sasha's uncle, sent by the family to Naples to look for Sasha, this being her last known location before she broke off all contact with her family two years before. Ted takes a leisurely approach to searching, though, preferring to warm up with some sightseeing first, and when he does run into Sasha it's largely by chance. She's keeping up with the petty thievery but with a bit of the old prostitution on the side just to supplement her income. She is not best pleased to see him at first but in his clumsy but persistent way he eventually persuades her to jack it in and come home.
And now we see that our judgment of where to draw the chalk mark denoting "now" was a bit off as we zoom a couple of decades into the future where Sasha and Drew are married (having reconnected on the internet) and have two children. We also meet Alex, a former one-night hookup of Sasha's, also now married with a small child, who's been tasked by Bennie with performing some magical social media influencing to drum up interest in an outdoor concert in New York featuring none other than Scotty, still a bit mental but just about keeping it together enough to make a triumphal musical return.
Some notes on structure first: as the paragraphs above suggest this is a novel told in short and discrete chunks, featuring a wide cast of characters and not in any sort of chronological order. Indeed were it not for the loose narrative thread and the shared cast you might say it's more of a short story collection. Personally I'm not that interested in categorisation arguments of that sort, and it's more of a novel than, say, Invisible Cities. As it happens the only other thing of Egan's that I'd read before was Emerald City, which definitely is a collection of short stories.
Secondly, the Stuff That Is Like Other Stuff list: much of what's here is reminiscent of modern American authors like Douglas Coupland and Rick Moody, the minutely detailed account Jules gives of the events leading up to his assault of Kitty Jackson is slightly reminiscent of Nicholson Baker and the heavy use of footnotes which simultaneously explain and undercut the main narrative is a bit Dave Eggers and a bit David Foster Wallace. Another thing that's a bit Dave Eggers is the last chapter, since it's quite reminiscent of The Circle in its depiction of a society five minutes in the future and just a little bit further down the social media rabbit hole than our own.
To be honest that last chapter works less well than some of the early ones, and there are a few episodes which don't work quite as well as the others, notably the bizarre episode with Dolly and the dictator she's taken on PR duties for. Perhaps this is because we've got attached to Sasha, who is the main character - to the extent that there is one - and are waiting to find out which part of her life we're going to shoot off to next. What the whole thing is about is more of a challenge: friendship, aging, how people simultaneously change and don't change as they get older, assuming they survive long enough to get the opportunity. It's very good, anyway, which is after all the most important thing. Various august bodies thought the same thing, as A Visit From The Goon Squad was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 (there's a list of previous featurees here) and the National Book Critics Circle Award the previous year (previous featurees are Ragtime, A Thousand Acres, Gilead, Wolf Hall and Lila). I therefore deduce that Gilead and A Thousand Acres are the only previous featurees to have won both.
Thursday, January 09, 2025
it's BOTY time again
So, hot on the heels of the stats roundup is another annual thing that I've now saddled myself with: the Books Of The Year thing. I'd say this was one of the more difficult years to pick three from as there weren't really three that stood out above the others - that sounds like a terrible indictment of a whole year of beige mediocrity novel-wise, but I don't think that'd be right.
The tail-end of 2026 will mark the scarcely-believable twentieth anniversary of this blog, so maybe if I am, or indeed any of us are, still alive at that point I'll do some sort of overall Top Ten countdown or something.
| Year | Author | Title | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Trevanian | Shibumi | tending his garden, perfecting his go technique, exploring the extensive local cave systems and having eye-wateringly athletic tantric sex |
| Jonathan Franzen | Freedom | Freed of any obligation to Patty, Walter and Lalitha quickly start going at it like knives | |
| Christopher Priest | The Prestige | spooky banging on the table, rattling of curtains and maybe a bit of the old ectoplasm on special occasions |
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
stats entertainment
Here's the obligatory end-of-year/beginning-of-following-year roundup of blogging activities and the like. Anyone who'd just like the management summary can take away the headline fact that 2024 was pretty similar to 2023 in most respects, remarkably similar in fact.
Just to illustrate that point: 2023 had 59 posts overall and 23 book reviews, while 2024 had 58 posts overall of which 22 were book reviews. There is a little bit of a subtlety here, though, in that I actually read (or, more accurately, finished) 23 books in 2024 but the last one was so near to the end of the year that I didn't get round to writing the review until 2025. The overall page count and therefore average book length were very slightly up on 2023; the outliers here remain 2011 and 2021 (overall page count) and 2020 (average book length). The sex split (no, stop it) was exactly the same as 2023: 17 male authors, 6 female. Anyway, here are the graphs you ordered:
A quick note on the most recent review, still very much in the realm of stats nerdery: if we insist on actual words in the title (and therefore treat G. as a special case) then Ice jointly holds the record for shortest title in this list, along with Pig and Utz. It also joins the list of one-word titles referred to here.
smallebrity lookeylikey of the day
Today's pair are my son Huw and 1970s yellow cartoon weirdo Bod. Small skinny-legged person, three-letter name, voluminous upper garment coming down below waist level, profile view that makes them appear to only have one leg.
A bit of context for both halves of the image: the thing Huwie is standing on is a groyne (no, stop it) on Southbourne beach where we were last weekend, and the thing Bod is looking at is, and I quote: "an enormous bowl of strawberries and cream". This is from the episode Bod's Dream which can be seen here. The thing people who grew up in the 1970s forget about Bod is that the animated bit was only the first 4-5 minutes of a 15-minute show, and the rest of it was filled with some stuff-spotting puzzles, random songs and the interminable adventures of Alberto Frog And His Amazing Animal Band, culminating in the impossibly thrilling climax wherein Alberto chose a flavour of milkshake for a reward (for solving some mystery or other) from a shortlist of about three.
Monday, January 06, 2025
the last book I read
A catastrophe of some sort has occurred, ill-defined but almost certainly the result of a nuclear conflict, and as a result the world's climate has been knocked all to cock and some sort of sudden and intense ice age is in progress, gradually progressing from the poles towards the equator.
Our unnamed protagonist is clearly a tough and resourceful sort of guy with links to senior figures in government and military organisations. He's not on official business at the moment, though; for one thing the fabric of society is starting to unravel as the ice grinds its way remorselessly downwards (or upwards, depending on your point of view and which hemisphere you're in), and for another he's nursing an obsession with a strange, fragile, silver-haired (and, I think we can assume, much younger) woman who he seems to have had some sort of prior relationship with.
So is he hoping for some rekindling of former sexy sexy times with this girl, perhaps as a sort of defiant last hurrah for humanity before the glaciers engulf everything and everyone's bits freeze off? Well, maybe, but it seems a bit more complicated than that; much of his internal thought process in relation to her seems to involve having an urge to hurt her in some way, and there are dark references to traumas in her past, maybe involving him, maybe not.
Anyway, his pursuit of her requires him to travel from country to country, including some locations that are a bit close to the encroaching ice-front for comfort. During one of his longer stays he comes into contact with another nameless individual (basically no-one has names here, or, rather, presumably they do but we're never told what they are) known only as "the warden" who seems to occupy a position of some power and influence in society (or what remains of it) but also seems to have some hold over the girl, who currently resides, not entirely willingly (but not entirely unwillingly either), at the castle where he lives.
So, storm the castle, rescue the girl, nick a car/boat/whatever, flee to warmer climes, have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over, right? Well, it's not quite as simple as that for a few reasons: firstly the complex and ambiguous nature of the warden's relationship with the girl, but also, more confusingly, the complex and ambiguous nature of the warden's relationship with our protagonist. Despite them seemingly never having met before there is some oddly fluid melding/merging of their personalities going on - the protagonist openly muses on whether they might actually be the same person, and the girl seems to have had the same idea. Whatever, eventually a crisis point is reached and the warden takes the girl away southwards by car (a trip they barely survive intact). Meanwhile our protagonist is airlifted out by the (presumably government) organisation he still - in some nebulous way - reports to.
Deposited in another country further from the approaching ice he is subjected to a strange Kafkaesque trial on ill-defined charges, escapes, falls in with a group of technicians setting up some sort of radio antenna near a border with a neighbouring country which his (presumably military) knowledge allows him to help with, hops the border and finds himself face-to-face with the warden again. What are the chances?
And so it goes on: another unnamed country, another seemingly-miraculous encounter with the warden and the girl, an escape, sometimes with the girl, sometimes not. And all the time the ice grinds onwards and time is running out. Eventually the scene repeats itself in a beachside cabin, and subsequently a headlong car ride through the driving snow, and it looks as if this may really be it this time. Or is it?
Firstly, let's do the list of novels on this blog where there's been some sort of apocalyptic event before the narrative even starts, in no particular order and with no particular hope that it'll be complete: In Watermelon Sugar, Virtual Light, The Road, Riddley Walker, O-Zone, Barefoot In The Head, On The Beach, The Pesthouse, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Death Of Grass, Station Eleven. Just to pick out a couple of obvious parallels, the inexorable approach of doom across the whole world is very reminiscent of On The Beach, and the distinct possibility that humanity's time may be up in the fairly near future is similar to The Road. But Ice exists in a weird little dream-like bubble of its own, and could very easily be a metaphor for something completely different. But what? An obsessive and abusive relationship? The author's own lifelong heroin addiction? In an odd way the book on this list which it most resembles is none of the ones listed above but instead Christopher Priest's The Affirmation with its odd dream-like quality, the sudden jarring shifts in perspective, weird coincidences and the voyage through a series of unfamiliar and unnamed countries (coincidentally Priest wrote a foreword to an earlier edition of Ice). There's also a whiff of JG Ballard about the whole thing, and a bit of a parallel with The Ice Palace: short book, icy title and setting, dream-like quality, enigmatic young female characters with opaque motivations. None of that quite captures its strangeness, though, and it certainly passes the "lingers oddly in the mind" test that I've mentioned before. It was the last thing Kavan (not her real name) published during her lifetime; she died in 1968, a year after its publication.
Anyway, it's very good, very short (170 pages) and I recommend it, as long as you're not wedded to ideas of strictly linear narrative or satisfyingly-resolved plots.
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